Reasons to Choose Microsoft Azure Cloud
Enterprises across the globe realize great success with business solutions especially powered by cloud. Cloud technologies are redefining the way they do business with scalable and secure cloud-enabled enterprise applications. One such example is Microsoft Azure – a public cloud computing platform.
Today, 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies use Microsoft Azure to drive their business. The deeply-integrated Azure cloud services help enterprises rapidly build, deploy, and manage easy to complex applications with ease. This article will help you understand the main features of Microsoft Azure and Cloud computing in general.
1.
What is Microsoft Azure Cloud?
Microsoft Azure is a cloud platform for building, deploying and managing services and applications from anywhere in the world. Azure will let you add cloud capabilities to your existing network through various platforms. Microsoft is constantly expanding its worldwide network of data centers to create Azure.
Microsoft Azure provides an ever-expanding array of services and products designed to meet all your needs through one convenient, easily managed platform.
The Microsoft Azure cloud platform provides more than 200 products and cloud services especially designed to help you bring new solutions to life. The platform is designed to solve today’s challenges and create the future.
Users can easily build, run and manage applications across multiple clouds (open source) with the tools and frameworks of their choice.
Microsoft Azure supports a wide range of programming languages, operating systems, frameworks, databases, and devices that allow enterprises to leverage tools and technologies they trust.
Are you planning for your company to migrate to the Cloud and are considering choosing Microsoft Azure? Then read this article to know more about what Microsoft Azure encompasses and the advantages of the cloud. You can also learn more about whether Microsoft Azure is the best choice for your organization.
In simple terms, it is a five minutes read that will surely help you understand the main features of Cloud computing and particularly Microsoft Azure in general.
2.
Services Provided by Microsoft Azure
You can use Microsoft’s Cloud platform, Azure, to build, deploy, and manage applications and services. You can use Azure as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Meaning your workloads, services, and applications will run on a server in one or more Microsoft data centers instead of on your hardware.
Besides IaaS, Azure offers other services like Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions.
There are a myriad of reasons to adopt Microsoft Azure, the three most compelling reasons being: security, savings, and scalability.
Azure also offers many Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. These services allow you to use a comprehensive deployment and development environment. They also provide a complete solution, including hosted applications and apps such as Microsoft Office 365.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) capabilities of Microsoft Azure
Azure boasts an enticing combination of PaaS and IaaS services. IaaS can enable enterprises to outsource their infrastructure on the Azure platform and pay for their use. PaaS lets users create their own web apps and solutions. Without having to buy and maintain the underlying infrastructure.
Azure consultants from the Microsoft partner community can work with these Enterprises to leverage Azure PaaS and IaaS to build enterprise apps on the Cloud. It would help enterprises accelerate their business growth with the use of these services.
3.
Advantages of Microsoft Azure
Affordable cloud solutions are slowly replacing old, obsolete data centers. Several important plates have emerged who provide cloud service. One that tops the list is Microsoft Azure.
You have so many options now. The list includes Amazon Web Services (AWS), Apple’s ubiquitous iCloud, and perennial computing giant IBM. But with so many options, why are companies like 3M, GE, and BMW moving workloads to Microsoft Azure?
It has been said that the on-premise data center has no future. Quite like dial-up modems and mainframes, self-hosted data centers are slowly becoming obsolete. Increasingly available and affordable cloud solutions are replacing them. Interestingly, Azure resource manager and Azure virtual machines are examples of such solution.
In order to cater to the market, there are several important players in the cloud computing space. Here are some of the reasons you should consider:
1 Flexibility
With Azure you can easily spin up new services and scale up your Azure data storage capabilities on the fly. Compared to a static data center, which would require new hardware and OS purchasing before any deployment or release besides other IT challenges. This modern flexibility has made Azure an attractive solution for companies of any size.
2 Cost
Microsoft Azure solutions do not just make it faster and easier to scale infrastructure, but they make it cheaper too. Physical infrastructure devices like load balancers, routers, and more quickly add up to thousands of dollars. In addition, there is the IT expertise required to run this equipment. Together this amounts to major payroll overhead. By leveraging Microsoft’s massive infrastructure and expertise, Azure, can trim your annual IT budget by a huge percentage.
3 Applications
With Microsoft’s a la carte service offerings like Visual Studio Application Insights and Visual Studio Team Services, Microsoft makes developing and testing mission-critical apps(mobile app) a cakewalk. You can quickly move an application from test to production mode on the fly across any globally distributed network.
4 Disaster recovery
Another advantage of Microsoft Azure is its high-speed and decentralized infrastructure. This platform creates limitless options for backup and disaster recovery plans. Thus ensuring that your critical application and data can be up and running without much hassle. Losing time means losing business, and with Microsoft Azure, you can guarantee continuous service delivery even when disaster strikes.
4.
What Can Microsoft Azure Do?
As you might have learnt that Microsoft maintains a growing directory of Azure services. With more and more services being added all the time.
You can find all the elements necessary to build a Azure virtual network and deliver services or applications to a global audience are available. These coils include virtual machines, SQL databases, and active directory domain services to name a few.
Here is a list:
1 Virtual machine
Creating Microsoft or Linux virtual machines or VMs is just minutes from a wide selection of marketplace templates. Most of these cloud-based VMs will host your services and apps as if they resided in your own data center.
2 SQL databases
Microsoft Azure offers managed SQL relational databases, from one to an unlimited number of Dbs, as a service. This will save you overhead and also expenses on hardware and software setups. In addition, this service can also save you the need for in-house expertise.
3 Application services
With Azure, it becomes even simpler to create and globally deploy applications that are compatible on all portable and popular web platforms. Reliable, scalable cloud access will let you respond quickly to your business’s flow, saving you time and money.
With the introduction of Azure Marketplace and Azure WebApps, it is easier than ever to manage testing, development, and deployment of web applications. In addition, these services will allow you to scale as quickly as your business.
4 Azure Active Directory Domain Services
It is built on the same proven technology as Windows Active Directory. This service from Microsoft Azure will let you remotely manage group authentication, policy, and everything else. This will make moving your existing security structure to the cloud as easy as a few clicks.
5 Storage
You can easily count on Microsoft’s global infrastructure to provide safe, secure, highly accessible data storage. The option will allow massive scalability and an intelligent pricing structure to store and access data at an optimum cost. You can also build a safe and cost-effective cloud storage plan using Azure.
5.
Why Choose Microsoft Azure?
Formerly known as Windows Azure, it is Microsoft’s public cloud computing platform. The platform provides a range of cloud services including analytics, storage and networking. End users can pick and choose from these services to develop new applications according to their needs.
It is indeed true that every business can have their reasons to choose Microsoft Azure services.
However, there are several unbeatable advantages that all can leverage upon, like:
Why OPT for Azure?
1 Azure can provide an enticing combination of Platform as a service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a platform (IaaS) that helps enterprises create and deploy their web apps without problems.
2 Azure has designed a Security Development Lifecycle. It is an industry-standard security process that considers all security features. Users can get licenses and ensure the best safety in all operations.
3 Azure already has a vast user base, so it is safe and secure to use. The infrastructure is constantly scaling up as more and more applications are adding up through the cloud.
4 A hybrid cloud computing ecosystem is a unique feature of Microsoft Azure and is preferred by many. It can improve the performance by utilizing VPNs or Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), ExpressRoute connections, caches, CDNs, and more.
5 Today most enterprises rely on MS office tools. Therefore, it is wise to invest in a cloud platform that integrates well with all Microsoft products. Primarily, Azure is a good example. Additionally, knowing C++, C, and Visual Basic can help you steer your career in Microsoft Azure.
6 Microsoft Azure has intelligence and analytics capacities to improve the business process. Additionally, this could be achieved with the help of cognitive APIs, machine learning bots, and Blockchain as a Service (BaaS).
7 Azure also has SQL and noSQL data processing facilities that can help get deeper and actionable insights from the available data.
8 One of the significant reasons you would choose Azure services is the affordability. Basically, as their virtual infrastructure maintenance is extremely cost-efficient.
Microsoft Azure and Security
Another major advantage of Azure is security. Privacy and security are embedded into the development of Azure. Currently, Azure has more certifications than any other cloud provider.
Not only is the cloud platform protected, but the end-user is also covered with Microsoft Azure. Moreover as security threats continue to multiply daily across the globe, this multi-level protection is essential. The threat targets end users and puts your business’ data at risk. Azure can provide user-friendly, simple, and easy-to-use services for increased protection. Examples are multi-factor authentication and application password requirements.
Before you choose to go ahead with Microsoft Azure for your business, it is also crucial to assess your needs before choosing a set of services the company provides.